The top reported proficiency rate is 87% in Social studies. The lowest is 14% in Science.
Original Research by School Decision on Ps 196 Ten Eyck
PS 196 Ten Eyck sits on Bushwick Avenue in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, part of New York City Geographic District 14. It serves children from pre-kindergarten through fifth grade, so there is no graduation rate to report and no AP or career pathway data — those measures simply do not apply to this grade band. The school is a regular public elementary, not a charter or magnet program.
The student body is predominantly Hispanic, with a substantial share of Black students and smaller representations of white, multiracial, and other groups. The overwhelming majority of students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, reflecting the economic character of the surrounding neighborhood. Data on English learner enrollment and students with IEPs was not available in what was provided.
State assessment results come from the New York State Testing Program and cover grades three through five in ELA, math, and science. In third grade, the school's proficiency in both ELA and math was the same — roughly three in five students reached the proficient-or-above threshold — which is the school's strongest showing across the tested grades. In fourth and fifth grade, math and ELA proficiency both fall to roughly three in ten to just under half of students tested, depending on the grade and subject. Fifth-grade science results are notably low, with only a small fraction of students scoring at the proficient level, well below the already modest ELA and math rates. Placed among schools with available proficiency data relative to districts in Kings County, the school's overall proficiency index sits below the midpoint of that comparison set. Parents who want to understand these patterns more deeply — whether the school has targeted supports in place, what the trajectory looks like year over year, or how specific student groups are performing — would want to ask the school directly, as trend data was not available here.
The zip code housing market around the school is expensive by any regional standard, sitting well above both the state and national benchmarks for home values, and rents have been climbing as well. Brooklyn as a borough is in a period of active residential growth, particularly Downtown and in Williamsburg, where new construction has added housing at a record pace in recent years. This means the neighborhood around PS 196 is in motion — families considering it as a long-term anchor should factor in that the surrounding built environment is actively changing.
District 14 itself carries a few things worth knowing. Publicly reported accounts describe steep enrollment declines at both the elementary and middle school levels since before the pandemic, and those declines have driven a citywide wave of school mergers and consolidations concentrated heavily in Brooklyn. That is a real consideration: families choosing a small District 14 elementary school are in a context where the city has been actively consolidating low-enrollment buildings. A 2022 New York State law also requires the city to phase in smaller class-size caps across all grade bands through the end of the decade, a change that, if implemented as required, would directly affect classroom conditions at PS 196. On the middle school transition side, publicly reported changes to admissions from a few years back shifted most middle schools in the district away from academic screening and toward lottery-based admission, though selective screens have since returned at a smaller number of schools citywide.
Brooklyn itself offers dense transit, highly walkable streets, and neighborhood-scale civic life. The area around Bushwick Avenue is served by subway and bus routes, and the borough's broader infrastructure — libraries, parks, healthcare — is accessible without a car. The neighborhood is not the same as the borough's leafier or more commercialized corridors, but it is genuinely urban in the way most Brooklyn families expect.
For a family zoned to PS 196, the third-grade academic results show real strength, and that is a reasonable foundation to build on. The drop in proficiency as students move through the upper elementary grades is a pattern worth discussing with the school, particularly around what support structures exist for students who arrive on grade level and what interventions are in place for those who are not.
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